I guess it's now on the main community site like right when you click "Forums" or "Community," but who seriously thought this was a good idea on a FRIDAY NIGHT?

Welcome to the club. If you play on EU servers, you're used to the servers going down prime time without warning often several times a week. Then they tell us that the US is the only market that matters so fuck us, but hey, when I bought this game I thought the game having dedicated EU servers meant they'd have separate EU maintainance times for EU servers like in, umm, every other game that has regional servers...

On the bright side, just had en epic Huttball match starting with "the servers are shutting down in 15 minutes" and a surprising "hey, let's win this in 10 minutes!" team attitude instead of curses and giving up. Never before seen a pug formulate a passing plan while in the starting room and proceed to murder the opposing team 6-0 in no time at all.

Shutting things down every 3 days or less is getting old. Not doing full maintence on actual patch days only to have to redo it a few times that same week getting old. Shutting the game down so often and still charging everyone play time is crap, atleast other mmos give you time back if they make errors or have to do fixes like they keep doing. I like the game and maybe I shouldn't have started playing while it was so new but much more of this stuff and I wont be getting more game time.

What gives me the right to complain? my 16 bucks a month and my jealousy towards those that don't care about 16 bucks a month.

You know what I fucking hate about these threads?
People saying 'omg I'm cancelling my subscrption'

Two things.
Please, do us a favour and leave the game and do not return to the forums of a game which you loathe.
Secondly, if you didn't expect 'emergency downtime' during the early days of a new and popular online game, then there's something wrong with your perception of gaming in this century. It is something that you have to just grin and bare, and it's still early days whether the people want to accept that or not. I for one am annoyed about the situation but I certainly won't be complaining since there's good reason for implementing a server shutdown to fix errors.

Look at World of Warcraft as an example. Do you see random server shut downs now? No you don't because in the last 10 years or so of development, Blizzard have become more efficient at deploying patches and making sure the content is wrinkle free. Sure on major patch days servers will be down for 4-8 extra hours, which is lame, but you know it's worth it.

tl;dr if you're committed to a game you will accept that there will be downtime. Until BioWare are in a comfortable situation with the game it will be like this. It happens in every game, and has happened a lot more to previous games; we just forget because many of us didn't actually play during the launch periods of those games.

Sounds like repeatedly looting a chest from a Raid boss, and being able to bring more than 16 people into an Operation is a pretty game breaking exploit, that needs to be fixed immediately. I am however quite unhappy about the timing of this patch. If people exploiting the loot in raids was the reason they had to do emergency shut down, I hope some bans go out.

I completely agree if some shitheads were taking advantage of bugs so badly they shut the game down on a Friday night they they should all get their accounts locked. Bioware has been pretty aggresive with banning ppl for things so far hopefully that continues.

I guess that was clear that we should read on to find out that they meant the 28th.

From their Post

Our upcoming maintenance for January 28th will begin from 2AM CST (12AM PST/3AM EST/8AM GMT/9AM CET) until 6AM CST (4AM PST/7AM EST/12PM GMT/1PM CET). All game servers will be offline during this period. This maintenance is expected to take no more than four hours, but could be extended.

What gives me the right to complain? my 16 bucks a month and my jealousy towards those that don't care about 16 bucks a month.

No sarcasm. I actually agree with Tyrven.

Where did I say you couldn't complain or shouldn't if you are unhappy? You pay for a service whatever the cost and you dont get what you paid for but are still charged and ppl are going to be rightfully mad. For many the upset isn't over the 50 cents a day they paid its the fact they paid and out of the blue are just kicked off on what is peek hours for some of the servers with non US gamers on them.

Our upcoming maintenance for January 28th will begin from 2AM CST (12AM PST/3AM EST/8AM GMT/9AM CET) until 6AM CST (4AM PST/7AM EST/12PM GMT/1PM CET). All game servers will be offline during this period. This maintenance is expected to take no more than four hours, but could be extended.

On the bright side, just had en epic Huttball match starting with "the servers are shutting down in 15 minutes" and a surprising "hey, let's win this in 10 minutes!" team attitude instead of curses and giving up. Never before seen a pug formulate a passing plan while in the starting room and proceed to murder the opposing team 6-0 in no time at all.

Funny, my huttball match had the opposite happen. Right after that annoucement 3 people left the game, 2 others just went into a corner to afk, leaving 3 of us to be cannonfodder. Oh well, guess the opposing team had a good time of I suppose.

I'm happy that they're taking the servers down for fixes. I'd just wish that 1) they'd post patch notes and 2) they'd give more warning in-game, especially if they decide to take down the server that day. If it's a couple days notice I'll see the maintenance info in the launcher. But I don't usually troll SWTOR.com if I'm playing the game, and I was doing exactly that since they posted that info. If they had an in-game warning for one hour before patch, I'd be able to plan accordingly.

As it was, I was smack in the middle of False Emperor. Didn't even have time to get to Malgus.

A 4-hour maintenance is $0.08 of game time. People throw a fit when something is bugged, then they get upset when the servers are taken down to fix it.

I think that the timing and poor warning is the issue for many. The fact that they have times set up to do these things and have cut them short each time only to have to do them over and over again also sucks. Say you have a maid and she is supposed to clean your house for an hour a week she only does it for 20 minutes but then keeps popping back over the next few days because she forgot to vacuum then the next day because she forgot to was a tub.

I am pretty upset myself at the outage, but I've been there during the wow vanilla and bc days, and outages were as bad or even worse. There were servers crashing and also rollbacks because of inconsistent synchronization / saves, which for SWTOR I have not experienced yet, the servers themselves are pretty stable.

Thinking more rationnaly, Bioware is making his team work on a friday night / saturday morning dead middle of the night shift in order to fix things. It shows they're committed to iron out the bugs no matter the cost.

As a software dev myself, I am pretty impressed at the current work schedule of the Bioware dev. Either they're gonna make their whole team collapse and their dev quit, or they've got an incredible organization that has a 24x7 dev team working around the clock. I am really hoping for the latter but my experience tells me that more often than not, and especially with EA sad track records of slaving their devs, there is the risk that the Bioware dev team will explode and we'll get bad support from then on.

Anyway, grats to Bioware for working round the clock now. I hope they'll be able to keep it up (and get better at it too, so that they can patch them' bugs faster...).

A 4-hour maintenance is $0.08 of game time. People throw a fit when something is bugged, then they get upset when the servers are taken down to fix it.

Its not the price people should be worried about its the timing, they have pulled the game down in peak hours on a few occasions now, Friday night maintenance is stupid, even more so without a proper warning ( 2 days early)

And why do people keep comparing these sort of issues to vanilla wow when that game is over 7 years old? the mmo genre as moved on, infact the internet as a whole as moved on in 7 years these excuses shouldn't be viable in 2012

Your talking about 7 years ago, the mmo market was nothing like todays market, stop trying to compare a new released game to a 7 year old title.

You're right, pages of coding have only substantially increased since and takes even longer + more resources to find/fix errors or replicate issues.

Glad somehow you think "the market" makes that easier overtime.

Originally Posted by Tyrven

I think that the timing and poor warning is the issue for many. The fact that they have times set up to do these things and have cut them short each time only to have to do them over and over again also sucks. Say you have a maid and she is supposed to clean your house for an hour a week she only does it for 20 minutes but then keeps popping back over the next few days because she forgot to vacuum then the next day because she forgot to was a tub.

This is programming not cleaning your basement, there is no comparison. If you have to make one then in her contract she's told what needs to be cleaned when she comes in for the week. Where as this game is more like being a plumber, they fix the kitchen sink but the boiler may fail 2 days later, then maybe the bathroom sink another couple days, then some other pipe burst and so on and so on...

So would you rather wait 1 week with no hot water and leaking pipes damaging your house to be repaired? Or resolving a specific problem now before it causes more damage?

I think that the timing and poor warning is the issue for many. The fact that they have times set up to do these things and have cut them short each time only to have to do them over and over again also sucks. Say you have a maid and she is supposed to clean your house for an hour a week she only does it for 20 minutes but then keeps popping back over the next few days because she forgot to vacuum then the next day because she forgot to was a tub.

Yea let's compare a maid to a complicated server network. Surely even you can see the flaw in that. Love all the whining, as if 4 hours (which probably ends up being just 2 like always) is the end of the world. It isn't.